David K. Shipler's Blog, page 5

 

By David K. Shipler 

                TheEarth is on fire. And Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are poised to dismantleall the funding and regulations to combat global warming.

Racial bigotry runs rampant inplain view. And Republicans bar the topic from classrooms, emasculate theVoting Rights Act, and move to ban the military’s anti-discrimination programs.

The COVID pandemic triggers rapid,ground-breaking vaccine development. And Republican officials demonize scientists,fight protective measures, and hound numerous public health specialists out oftheir jobs.

And so on. The Republican Party hasled the United States into a peculiar era of contempt for knowledge, disdainfor the experts who have acquired it, and suspicion of fellow Americans whorevere learning. “Expert” has become a dirty word.

From Republican-controlled statehouses to public universities, secondary schools, so-called “news”organizations, and libraries, a concerted campaign is on to create deserts ofignorance where no fruits of accumulated understanding can grow. These blanklandscapes are devoid of the conscientious research and reasoning gathered overdecades. In the empty patches, weeds grow—the weeds of fabricated conspiraciesand dogmatic thinking. They are producing a harvest of contempt for any truththat violates a predilection.

There is a class element to this, abottom-up sense that the elites with all their schooling really know nothing aboutthe real world and care nothing for those whose names are not followed by letterssignifying advanced degrees. This phenomenon of disparagement is a symptom ofpowerlessness, marginalization, and alienation. It was accelerated by the GreatRecession of 2007-08—triggered by elite wheeler-dealers in finance. Lowermiddle-class families lost equity in their homes, jobs that had seemed secure,and confidence in their futures—a logical sequel to the decline ofmanufacturing and the stability it had provided. People’s foundations wereshaken.

One outcome has been fear,particularly among whites without a college education. Not just fear ofpersonal economic vulnerability, but also anxiety about change in demographyand society: rising  numbers of non-whites,shifting social attitudes on sexual orientation and other issues, declining trustin such big institutions as government. That perspective sees an Americadrifting from some idyllic essence. Make America Great Again—Again.

That idyl is a myth, of course, picturinga supposedly homogeneous United States—white, Christian, socially traditional,heterosexual, family-based—a comforting Norman-Rockwell culture withnon-accented English and red-blooded “American” names. It’s no surprise that itis nurtured mostly in rural areas where the myth is closer to reality, andwhere the new Republican Party finds ready voters.

Fear is convenient to certainbrands of politicians, especially those aspiring to autocracy. As we have seen,fear has been cynically stoked by Trump and his fellow co-conspirators in thegreat takeover of a once-responsible political party. Where Republicans oncegarnered moreelectoral support than Democrats from voters with college degrees, it’s nowthe opposite. Democrats have largely lost their appeal among the white workingclass, where Republican fear mongering has gained ground.

That is not to say that a thirstfor knowledge—and its delightful ambiguities and contradictions—is monopolizedby the college-educated. Smarts and curiosity are widely distributed up anddown the socio-economic scale, blessing those without university diplomas andalso skipping many of those who have them. But informing yourself these days takesmore time and skill than long working hours and defective schooling usuallyallow, a handicap for those who lack leisure and luxury.

Republicans have profited from thedeep inadequacies of the country’s education systems, which mostly neglect toteach students how to check facts, discern truth from propaganda, and filterthrough the internet maze of reports and claims. (The News Literacy Project has developed curricula and onlinetools to help teachers do just that.) Under the guise of awarding parentscontrol over their kids’ schooling, Republican lawmakers in Florida, Texas, andelsewhere are moving aggressively to erase honest history and relevantcontemporary discussion from classrooms, and to remove books on race and sexualorientation from courses and libraries. The objective, it seems, is to createpockets of abject ignorance in the rising generations.  

That will work to the advantage ofa party that wants to manipulate instead of educate. Even more troubling thanthe Republican schemes to fool the public is the capacity of large parts of thepublic to be fooled.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridgewrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as an aesthetic component of readers’acceptance of literature’s plausibility. But he meant it as a conscious,creative process. In American politics, the willing suspension of disbelief allowsmendacious actors room for mischief.

Hence, the Republicans’ ideology ofignorance. It is easier to convince citizens to ignore racial bias if youobliterate its history from classrooms. It is easier to foster contempt foryour political opponents if you impugn their support for transgender people asmorally harmful to children. It is easier to frighten people that they arelosing parental authority if you brand relevant books and classroom discussion onrace and gender as self-blaming, pornographic, or perverted.

It is a cleverly constructedstrategy at the heart of Trump’s spellbinding appeal and his intellectualcorruption of the Republican Party, once a responsible bastion of temperedgovernance. Trump and his copycats create areas of ignorance with their perpetualtempests of lies. They conjure up a mirage of candor but obliterate knowledge.

I am reminded of a day off thecoast of Maine, sailing through a heavy rainstorm. The radar, unable topenetrate the downpour, displayed a screen entirely lit up in vivid orange,blotting out all traces of nearby boats, buoys, and treacherous land—the realitythat I needed to see. Thankfully, the storm soon passed.

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The right-wing Israeli government’s plan to eviscerate the powers of the country’s courts has generated massive demonstrations in the streets, worries by foreign investors, and boycotts of military service by hundreds of reservists in elite special forces and air force units. But the “independent judiciary” the protesters are defending does not have a sterling record on civil rights, especially those of Palestinian Arabs.

                The Supreme Court has refused to rule against the government’s inflammatory strategy of settling Jews in the occupied West Bank, a practice barred by the Fourth Geneva Convention. It has generally permitted the army to demolish the family homes of Arabs accused of terrorism, a form of collective punishment that the Geneva Convention also forbids. (Demolition is never used against Jews charged with terrorism against Arabs.) Inside Israel, the court has upheld a form of segregation by allowing rural villages and kibbutzim to reject would-be residents for “incompatibility with the social-cultural fabric of the town.”

The justices have only tinkered around the edges of the government’s tough practices. They have occasionally ordereda small Jewish settlement dismantled for taking Palestinian land. For similar reasons, they have required minor changes in the route of Israel’s security wall built on the border of the West Bank. They have ruled against demolishing a house where the accused did not actually live, and where a family tried to prevent the terrorist act. But the justices have typically avoided sweeping judgments on major policies affecting Palestinians’ rights, deferring to security concerns and gradually reducing the influence of international law.

                “Over the years,” says B’Tselem, an Israeli civil liberties organization, “the Supreme Court has permitted nearly every kind of human rights violation that Israel has committed in the Occupied Territories.”

Why, then, is the extreme political right so intent on emasculating the judiciary? First, the Supreme Court has gone the other way in a few important areas. It struck down a law exempting the state from liability for damaging civilian property during security operations in the West Bank. It limited the length of time that “infiltrators,” namely illegal immigrants from Africa, could be held in a desert prison camp that was designed as a deterrent to further arrivals.

And, most politically charged, the court overturned, as discriminatory, the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from the military service that all other Israeli men and women must perform. (Although, with ultra-Orthodox parties giving governing coalitions their parliamentary majorities, governments have repeatedly obtained the court’s permission to extend the exemption.)

                Second, if Israel annexes the West Bank as many on the political right desire, the military’s authority there would presumably end, along with the military courts that have tried Palestinians on both security and criminal charges since the territory was captured in the 1967 war. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would grant Palestinian residents access to the same rights in the same criminal justice system as Israelis. That would not be welcomed by the virulent anti-Arab members of the current government.

                Last but certainly not least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to stay out of prison if his endless trial on corruption charges, which began in May 2020, ever ends with a conviction. An independent judicial system is such an inconvenience to authoritarian-minded leaders, as former president Donald Trump might soon discover.   

Nevertheless, Israel’s Supreme Court seems less of a threat to some of the right-wing agenda than the protests in its favor might suggest. It has grown more restrained and more conservative in recent decades, especially since the retirement in 2006 of its president, Aharon Barak, a jurist revered both in Israel and abroad for his capacity to apply human rights to the exigencies of security interests.

In 2011, for example, the court essentially reversed a 1983 judgment by Barak against ten Israeli-owned quarries that were extracting building materials from the occupied West Bank. Citing the Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, Barak’s court had ruled, “An area held under belligerent occupation is not an open field for economic exploitation.” He reaffirmed the judgment in 2004. But in 2011, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch found that the long period of occupation “requires the laws be conformed to meet reality on the ground,” which she said included “the right to utilize natural resources in a reasonable manner.”

  In retirement, former Justice Barak recently called the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan “a string of poison pills” that would be “the beginning of the end of the Third House,” meaning the third historical period of Jewish sovereignty after the eras of the ancient First and Second Temples.

Barak’s warning was airily dismissed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who declared that the former Supreme Court president “does not understand the essence of democracy,” endangered, in Levin’s view, because “all power rests with the judges, and they decide what’s proportionate and reasonable. That’s not democratic.”

But it is the Justice Minister who does not understand the essence of democracy, which relies on the separation of powers, a cardinal principle recognized by the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets. Israel’s Supreme Court is the only institution standing in the way of unfettered political diktat. With a parliamentary system whose majority always controls the executive branch, no other check or balance exists.

The country has no constitution; a failed constitutional assembly after Israel’s creation in 1948 led to the enactment by the Knesset, the parliament, of what’s called Basic Law, a dozen principles on “human dignity and liberty” derived from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Basic Law figures in the Supreme Court’s rulings on the “constitutionality” of statutes passed by the Knesset. Yet the court has been cautious, overturning only 22 laws since the power of judicial review was established in 1992, an annual rate lower than the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

It appears that even as the authority to annul laws has been rarely used, its existence has restrained the executive and legislative branches in the past. Not so much today, as the government has shifted to the right, and “elected officials have become less likely to accept legal advice to amend or withdraw bills that are constitutionally problematic,” according to Yuval Shany and Guy Lurie of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Ironically, given all the protests, the Supreme Court has suffered a decline in public trust, from 80 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2010 to 41 percent in 2021. “While the words ‘there are judges in Jerusalem’ used to put an end to public debate, today they provoke it,” wrote Yedidia Z. Stern, former dean of the law faculty at Bar-Ilan University, back in 2010. Dissatisfaction reigns on both the right and the left of the political and religious spectrums.

Yet for the sake of democracy, large numbers of Israelis seem to realize, the center has to hold. If Netanyahu and his justice minister looked around the world or into history, they would see how every dictatorship subverts and expropriates its judiciary. In the Soviet Union, pro-democracy dissidents used to speak of “telephone justice,” delivered by judges who first called Communist Party officials for instructions. In today’s Russia, supine courts mostly do the Kremlin’s bidding. Hungary’s semi-autocrat Victor Orban has emasculated the courts, which are also lapdogs of the regimes in Iran, China, and other authoritarian systems.

                Netanyahu and his extremist, anti-Arab cabinet are ramming through legislation that would require an 80 percent majority on the Supreme Court to invalidate a law, and would empower the Knesset to annul that ruling or any other with just a one-vote majority of legislators. Justices would be appointed mainly by governing politicians in a restructured Judicial Selection Committee, instead of the one currently dominated by nonpartisan judges and lawyers.

                That would set the stage for a kind of elected autocracy, placed in office by the voters but unchecked by the rule of law—or of any law other than the one enacted at the whim of the legislature, the executive, and their hand-picked judges, all three branches flowing into a single stream of authority.

                The sad question is whether Palestinians would notice much difference. Maybe not, since they haven’t had much success anyway, through Israel’s independent courts, fighting discriminatory laws and regulations.

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A reliably uninformed source has revealed that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s staffers, desperately bored without any significant national problems they’re allowed to address, have collected 41,000 hours of newsreel footage from 1939-45 and turned it over to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

                Reels of film are unreliably reported to be stacked in his reception area, in his office, and around his venerable desk. One pile, which swayed dangerously in a puff of Carlson’s bloviations, finally toppled over onto his favorite saying, etched into a plaque carved from a Mar a-Lago palm tree:

                “What you see with your own eyes is a rumor.”

                 According to inside misinformation, Our Boy Tucker is preparing a show of the most telling, iconoclastic clips hidden for decades. They will definitively rebut the assertions by elitist “historians” that certain “events” and “attacks” and “battles” occurred.

                Tucker’s show is to begin with a scene from Pearl Harbor at sunrise on Dec. 7, 1941. Contrary to the fabrication about a Japanese attack, the camera pans across the beautiful harbor, where U.S. Navy ships lie quietly in their berths, sailors lounging on deck or going about their peacetime chores of swabbing, painting, and wielding nothing more dangerous than an occasional screwdriver.

                An advance copy of Carlson’s narration for this bit has been smuggled out of the Fox digital files, which as we know are full of revealing texts and e-mails. Tucker is itching to declare: “The socialist President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s approval rating had tanked, so he mobilized his propaganda resources to invent a Japanese attack, just to boost his poll numbers. And it worked.”

                Film of London during the so-called “blitz” shows a pub-filled city of merry-makers. How come no V-1 “buzz bombs” are heard? Tucker plans to ask. How come there are no explosions? How come there’s nothing but the clinking sound of beer mugs and happy chatter? Carlson will tell us why, and you probably already know the answer.

                A particularly affecting scene will show a ship sailing placidly along in an open ocean. “Worried about U-boats?” Tucker will sneer. “Please. Look closely. We’ll freeze the frame here. See the passengers out on deck enjoying the sun and the sea? It’s a pleasure cruise, folks, right there in the middle of 1943. Gimme a break.”

Then, a startling new clip of the so-called D-Day landing is sure to galvanize audiences. It is a beach scene, all right, but instead of helmeted soldiers in camouflage and belts of grenades, we will see a bunch of obviously American guys with their obviously French girlfriends playing volleyball on the sand and frolicking in the surf.

This momentous report will surely bring relief to all of us who have worried about the danger of a new war, World War Three. We didn’t even have World War Two, so relax.

Many reels have yet to be examined, according to our misinformed source, so we will just have to wait and see what long-suppressed scenes of benign German concentration camps the great Tucker Carlson will discover.   

                 This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Forty-three years ago this month, the United States voted for a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Jewish settlements in Arab territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war, and demanding that they be dismantled. After an immediate outcry by Israel and its American supporters, President Jimmy Carter backtracked, saying an affirmative vote had been authorized only if all references to Jerusalem were deleted, which they were not. He blamed miscommunication within his administration.

The Israeli cabinet didn’t buy the story, sayingthe vote “gives rise to deep resentment.” Vice President Walter Mondale was booed at a meeting of American Jewish leaders. And it didn’t help President Carter in his re-election bid that November, although his landslide loss to Ronald Reagan had numerous other causes, including the American diplomats being held hostage in Iran.

                Decades later, it’s clear that Carter was right about settlements being “obstacles to peace,” in the official phase that was used through several administrations. But the U.S. never took concrete action to stop their expansion. It pressed occasionally for construction freezes but never dared to use economic or military aid as leverage. President Trump even supported the settlements; his ambassador, David Friedman, endorsed their annexation by Israel.

The years of negligence have allowed a dangerous sore to fester. At the time of that U.N. vote in 1980, there were about 11,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank; today there are some 450,000. Then, a small and marginal assortment of zealous Jewish vigilantes harassed and attacked Palestinians; today, a widening crusade of armed Israeli thugs holds sway in many areas, as witnessed last week when hundreds of settlers, in retaliation for the murder of two young Israeli men, rampaged through four Palestinian villages, burning cars and houses, vandalizing homes, and terrorizing children—children, who will never forget.

The arsenal of memory is reinforced by the cycle of terrorism and revenge. Its weaponry is ready for deployment by both sides at any hint of compromise. So, as long as clashes on the ground occur between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, no high-level peace agreement can succeed, in the unlikely event that one should be negotiated. Furious hatreds have long been generated at the level of everyday life.

That doesn’t mean that Arabs and Jews have universally hostile relations on the West Bank. Palestinians work on construction crews building settlements, in Israeli-owned businesses, inside Israel itself if they have permission to commute through the border wall that now cuts off the West Bank. Some Arab-Jewish friendships exist.

Nor are the militant settlers the only cause of conflict, obviously. Palestinian leaders have a long history of missing opportunities to move toward reconciliation. Years ago, Israeli proposals were spurned or ignored. The Israeli left’s call of “land for peace” evaporated after Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005 and—instead of peace—got rocket fire as Hamas, the radical Palestinian movement, took power.

And yet, settlements on the West Bank have played a poisonous role in the unending war. Combined with stepped-up Israeli army raids against terrorist cells, settler violence has embittered ordinary Palestinians, with growing numbers promoting armed resistance, polls show. Even though the West Bank is far from a functioning democracy, no Palestinian leader can negotiate fruitfully without the population’s support. It is too easy to strike the match that will light the tinder of outrage.

In a perfect world, anybody of any religion, race, or nationality would be free to live peacefully anywhere, of course, unmolested by those of a different identity. But the Holy Land is far from perfect. It is a place where land is idolized, dogmatism is prized, and history is corrupted. The settlements, then, become instruments of politics and conquest.

 Israelis who move to the West Bank generally go for the subsidized housing, the semi-rural setting, or the religio-nationalist belief that God gave the Jews the deed to that land. But some bent on violence are drawn there by the conflict itself. They have usually been allowed to act against Palestinians with virtual impunity.  

Mixing biblical certainty with anti-Arab bigotry has made some settlements incubators of extremism. It has not been countered by any Israeli government, and won’t be by the current coalition, which includes ideological settlers in the cabinet. As a result, Israeli settlers have become both targets of terrorism and perpetrators of vigilantism.

This isn’t brand new. In 1983, settlers planted bombs in cars owned by the Arab mayors of Nablus and Ramallah; one lost both legs, the other, part of his left foot. A third mayor escaped after the Israeli army got a tip and warned him.

Later that year, a yeshiva student was stabbed to death in the West Bank city of Hebron, sparking a rampage by settlers who trashed and burned stalls in the Arab market. Then six settlers, including three who had been involved in the mayors’ bombing, dressed as Arabs and sprayed automatic gunfire into groups of students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three. Three of those settlers were sentenced to life in prison but were released only seven years later.

In 1994, a settler named Baruch Goldstein stormed into Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and killed 29 Muslim worshipers; survivors beat him to death. He was made a heroic martyr by the radical settler subculture and an inspiration to Prime Minister Yitzhak’s assassin, Yigal Amir, a frequent visitor to settlements. Though not a resident himself, Amir identified with the hard-core settlers’ movement.

Until recently, Goldstein’s picture hung on the wall of Israel’s new Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist settler who had distributed a flyer of Rabin in an SS uniform and declared, after stealing an ornament from Rabin’s car, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”

Aside from the misdeeds of settlers themselves, their communities have multiplied and fragmented West Bank territory into disjointed enclaves impossible to forge into contiguous areas under Palestinian rule. By explicit design over decades, Israel has essentially slammed the door on a two-state solution.

That was the goal, the former general Ariel Sharon told me back in 1979, when he was Agriculture Minister facilitating new settlements by building roads, pipelines, and electrical grids. “Security is not only guns and aircraft and tanks,” he said then, years before he became Defense Minister and later Prime Minister. “If people live in a place, they have the motivation to defend themselves, and the nation has the motivation to defend them. As long as these settlements are built, a Palestinian state will not be established in this area.”

Like the term “refugee camp,” “settlement” conveys a misleading sense of impermanence. Both have become perpetual. Refugee camps are now tightly-packed slums where generations have lived. Many Jewish settlements began as tents or mobile homes on Arab villages’ common agricultural land but are now established semi-suburbs of town houses and apartments, schools and synagogues—“facts on the ground,” Sharon used to call them.

Each side has radicalized the other. Whatever harmony some once imagined being possible between the two peoples in two neighboring states is being soured into discord every day. Nobody is trying any more to end the forever war.

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A year into Europe’s largest land war in nearly 80 years, the prospect of “winning” remains not only elusive but—more telling—defined by wishful thinking rather than military reality.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine seems capable of achieving its ambitious aims. Perhaps, looking far into the future, Russia will succeed in taking over all of Ukraine. Or perhaps Ukraine will manage to expel Russian forces from its entire territory, including Crimea and the eastern Donbas region that Moscow grabbed in 2014. Perhaps. But so far, neither scenario looks possible.

Instead, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a conflict of mutual loss. Russia is losing its soldiers and weapons, its global standing, its economic vitality, its modicum of cultural and political freedom, and hundreds of thousands of talented citizens who are fleeing abroad. Convicted prisoners, freed to fight, are coming home, along with traumatized troops bearing shame and emotional scars. Russian society is being wounded.

Ukraine is losing population to death and migration, its houses and bridges and factories and farms, its energy grid, its medical system, and its reliable independence. If it survives, it will be hobbled by neediness and severe militarization. The coming generation will not easily erase the terrors endured in childhood.

Yet there is talk of “victory.” What that means today is certainly not what will be claimed eventually in whatever compromise may be reached, for this war—unlike Vietnam and the two World Wars—is not susceptible to the categorical defeat of either side. Both portray it as a clash of virtues and values, a colossal contest over the entire international order.  

The grand argument was first launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly projected the limited “special military operation” onto a big screen of righteous purpose and noble Russian history. In his emotional reasoning, Ukraine is an ersatz country. It is essentially Russian by culture and tradition, hijacked by pro-Western neo-Nazis with designs on Mother Russia herself. Moreover, he declared this week, “the West seeks unlimited power” in an imperious quest to block the emergence of a more just, multipolar world. He has adopted Iran’s epithet “Satanism” to describe American policies.

“Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony,” Putin said, “they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace . . .  Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.”

In Putin’s pageant, Russia is the eternal victim. “They plan to finish us once and for all,” he said. “In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country.”

                President Biden has countered with a grand argument of his own, that Ukraine is a battleground over the broad future of autocracy vs. democracy. “President Putin is confronted with something today that he didn’t think was possible a year ago,” Biden said this week in Warsaw. “The democracies of the world have grown stronger, not weaker. But the autocrats of the world have grown weaker, not stronger.”

                It’s a debatable point, given the surge in ultra-right, anti-democratic movements from Israel to Hungary to the United States itself. Yet Biden’s cause is as sweeping as Putin’s. “This struggle will define the world,” Biden declared, quoting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, “and what our children and grandchildren—how they live, and then their children and grandchildren.” Biden added: “Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever.  For that’s what — that’s what’s at stake here: freedom.”

                That’s about as large a purpose as you can find. More accurately, Biden might call it an anti-colonial war by Ukraine against the centuries of periodic rule by Russia. That’s what it really is. And it would be a nice rebuttal to Putin, who rails against the West’s historic colonialism to woo former colonies in Africa and elsewhere, an attack with some traction. It would be interesting to see the reactions if Biden turned the tables.

It's possible to get trapped by your own propaganda. Wars always carry rhetoric to rally citizens and allies, but hyperbole can also narrow your own options. Currently, the grand arguments by the two superpowers have walled off whatever common ground might be found.

That leaves military means for Russia to seize and hold blood-soaked Ukrainian ground, or for the West to batter Russian forces into submission. Neither prospect looks likely.

Putin shows no opening to negotiate down from his maximalist and messianic dreams. Zelensky and Biden and NATO are just as unyielding. All wait and hope for battlefield advantage that will be reflected in a moderation of the enemy’s position. 

                Meanwhile, the losses mount. The physical repair of Ukraine, which is being pummeled into ruins, will cost trillions of dollars over decades. The skills of Ukraine’s citizens killed and scattered will create vacuums of expertise not easily restored. To guard its sovereignty, the country will need to grow into a military “porcupine,” as strategic planners say, bristling with weaponry that Russia will see as threatening—maybe a deterrent, maybe a provocation, probably destabilizing. If that happens, there will eventually be another war, and another.

While Putin works to destroy Ukraine, he campaigns against Russia itself. Aside from its nuclear weapons, Russia no longer strides the earth as a formidable military power but rather a bumbling, poorly trained, badly equipped, desperate force of convicts and conscripts who doubt their mission as they are fed into the maws of a Ukrainian citizen army acutely motivated to avoid renewed Russian domination. His soldiers, who have tortured and raped and murdered innocents, who have forcibly deported thousands of children to Russia, who have tried to freeze civilians into submission this winter, have generated international hatred.

At home, the fledgling freedoms Russians enjoyed in the post-Soviet era are being stripped away. The independent press is gone. Art is once again compromised for the sake of propaganda: The director of the esteemed Tretyakov Gallery is replaced by the daughter of a secret police official. Honest history is snuffed out, as human rights institutions are closed, most recently the respected organizations Memorial and the Sakharov Center.

Even low-level dissent is treated more brutally than in the late period of the Soviet Union. Then, a Russian might lose a trip abroad, a promotion, or a job but to trigger imprisonment, dissent usually had to be public and persistent. Now, even a couple in a restaurant, talking in low voices to each other in dismay about the war, are reported by an eavesdropper and “arrested, handcuffed, and forced to the floor” by police, The Washington Post reports.

“An older woman on a bus,” the Postcontinues, is “dragged from her seat, thrown to the floor and roughly pushed out the door by passengers because she called Russia an empire that sends men to fight in cheap rubber boots.”

Mobilizing citizens to enforce orthodoxy is an old technique of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Combined with the atrocities being committed in Ukraine, it creates a specter of Russia and Russians that is likely to infiltrate Western books, films, popular suspicions, and official policy. As we saw in the villainous images of Japanese and Germans after World War II, they can take decades to fade. 

Although it hasn’t been popular to quote Neville Chamberlain since his posture of appeasement in 1938, on the eve of World War II, he was right on one point: “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            At Sunday’s Super Bowl, the United States will congratulate itself on another racial milestone, the first time two Black quarterbacks have played in the culminating game of the country’s most popular sport. “Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes will make history on Sunday,” crowed CBS News.

But the history is a lesson in bigotry, illustrating how devious stereotypes can be.

The latest “first” is a cause for celebration, to be sure. It is no exoneration of American society, however, for the racial assumptions that have made this so long in coming still whirl around Blacks, whether professional athletes or ordinary mortals. Tangible barriers that are broken often leave a strong residue of bias—in this case, about the interactions of the mind, the body, and the power of Blacks on the field or off.   

Americans love to chart progress. We have had the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black defense secretary, the first Black secretary of state, the first Black Supreme Court justice, the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on. And now “the first Black House Minority Leader in history” as President Biden said in his State of the Union Address, congratulating Representative Hakeem Jeffries.

 Whether Jeffries was pleased or displeased by the label was hard to tell by the neutral expression on his face. Not every Black or Muslim or woman or gay person who gets past the obstacle loves being defined primarily that way. Jeffries and the rest of us might reasonably wonder if the day will ever come when the phrase “the first Black [fill in the blank]” can be relegated to a distant past.

            The first Black quarterback to start in the Superbowl was Doug Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory in 1988. He won the Lombardi Trophy and was named the game’s most valuable player. But he hadn’t been the team’s starter at the beginning of the season, when Black quarterbacks overall started fewer than 10 percentof NFL games. 

            Several years later, for my book A Country of Strangers, I looked into the patterns of prejudice that was keeping Black players out of the quarterback position. A system of tracking was putting high school athletes on career-changing detours, especially if they came from mostly Black schools, according to Richard L. Schaefer, former attorney for the National Football League Players Association. On college teams, he said then, talented Black quarterbacks were being bumped to other positions considered more physical than mental. “I think it’s a subtle, perhaps even subconscious, kind of bigotry.”

            The bigotry pairs two of the society’s longest-standing stereotypes of Blacks as both physically strong and mentally weak. Since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson, who codified those images in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, there has been a tendency in white America to see the body and the mind as opposite poles, perceptions that persisted and shaped college and NFL coaches’ decisions centuries later.

Sportscasters used to call a good play by a Black an “athletic move” and by a white a “smart move.” You don’t hear that distinction much anymore, but the assumptions once took their toll. “There is a tradition in sports of saying that when the Black guy succeeds, he’s a great natural ” Schaefer observed in the 1990s. “When the white guy succeeds, it’s due to hard work and perseverance and his own dedication to his sport.” This implied “that it’s just a physical versus a mental thing.”

The practice of sorting Blacks players out of so-called thinking positions was documented by the Players Association in a 1980 report: “The ‘Black Positions’—running back, defensive back, and wide receiver—were rated by the coaches as demanding physical speed, physical quickness, and high achievement motivation.” Blacks were shunted away from quarterback, center, and linebacker, who “tend to have the greatest opportunity to have a controlling influence on the outcome.”

The positions long denied to Blacks were leadership and decision-making roles requiring “frequent social interactions calling for interpersonal acceptability,” the Players Association observed. Those were also the spots from which players could graduate after retirement to managerial jobs in professional football.

But Blacks in power have long stirred discomfort, ambivalence, or outright resentment among a swath of white America, as if the natural order of society were being disrupted. Witness the backlash to Barak Obama achieving the presidency, a much more visceral revulsion among rightwing whites than policy differences alone could explain.

“In pro football’s portion of the civil rights struggle, the last positions to be desegregated were center, middle linebacker and quarterback,” Samuel G. Freedman once wrote. “Those three spots, not coincidentally, required the greatest intellectual acumen, because they involved calling the blocking assignments (center), defensive alignment (middle linebacker) and the entire offense (quarterback). In the late 1960s, white supremacist perceptions still kept Blacks from quarterbacking an NFL team. No Black player could possibly be smart enough, have the required strength of character or possibly give orders to white teammates.”

            Bias was self-defeating, of course, in sports as in every area of life, by excluding whole reservoirs of talent. In fact, Southern resistance to school desegregation eventually eroded partly because of Black students playing on integrated teams. The white chairman of B, E & K Construction Company in Birmingham, Alabama, put it this way to me back in the late 1990s. “The first thing that caught the attention of the whites in the South, in my view, was that they started realizing that they could win football games with black athletes. I really believe, when I think back, that that’s what turned them around.”

            College and pro football took the same lesson eventually, and the roster of Black quarterbacks has grown to include impressive, quick-minded readers of complex field positions and precise executors of intricate plays.

Mahomes, of the Kansas City Chiefs, is biracial and identifies as Black. He will meet Hurts, of the Philadelphia Eagles Sunday in the dazzling spectacle that is bound to blind most of the country to the continuing prejudices that have shaped American society, football included. Both men played quarterback in college, a big change from decades past.

 That doesn’t mean that the biases have disappeared, especially outside the stadium. If only the game were the template for the country as a whole.

            “It is the only place in life where it doesn’t matter anymore who your daddy was or how much money you have or whether you’re white or black,” said Schaeffer years ago. “It is literally the even playing field we’re always metaphorically searching for in this world.”

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis has opened a window onto the complexity of race as a factor in policing. A conventional assumption has been disrupted—that racism alone drives police brutality against Black citizens. Yet it would be a mistake to use the tragedy as an excuse to discount racial bigotry’s role in police behavior nationwide, and perhaps even in this case.

Unlike many other police killings of unarmed Black men, there was no frightened, trigger-happy white cop. There was no white-dominated “law enforcement” apparatus structured to keep Blacks down. Nichols was a young Black man beaten to death after a traffic stop by five Black officers in a mostly-Black police department headed by a Black police chief in a Black-majority city.

It’s a rare lineup of elements, and it has forced questions that seem to have nothing to do with race: about how police recruits are screened, how they are trained, how they are socialized once they’re in uniform, and how rules governing the use of force are designed and enforced.

Yet none of those areas is impervious to insidious racial stereotyping. They are all vulnerable to subtle interactions between race and power. Even Blacks, in keeping with a pattern seen broadly in multiracial settings, may internalize the negative stereotypes of themselves that are taught by the larger, white society.

Therefore, when America’s longstanding images of the Black man as aggressive, violent, and dangerous are lodged in any officer’s expectations, high anxiety can provoke preemptive force—by Black cops as well as white. The nervousness is enhanced during traffic stops, which cops are trained to believe are more life-threatening than the data show.

From 2016 to 2021, about 60 officers were killed by drivers they’d pulled over, a rate of less than 1 death per 3.6 million stops, according to The New York Times.  As Kalfani Ture, a Black criminologist and former Georgia cop, told The Times, “Police think ‘vehicle stops are dangerous’ and “Black people are dangerous,’ and the combination is volatile.”

Police officers tend to encounter the worst of humanity, which naturally shapes their perceptions of the citizens they confront. So in high-crime neighborhoods where officers expect to see drug dealers, thieves, and other miscreants, conclusions are easy to jump to, especially when racial stereotyping is added to the mix.

Cops are also empowered to expect compliance with their instructions. A good number of police killings occur when someone defies an officer’s order to get out of the car, lie on the ground, give his hands up for cuffing, or the like. It takes a cool head for a cop not to take it personally; anger can quickly translate into violence.

Because Blacks’ power in America has been so restricted historically, and because they’re sometimes resented when they do have authority, Black officers don’t necessarily react better than whites to a civilian’s disobedience. As James Baldwin wrote in 1955, “In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”

We don’t know what was going on inside the minds of the five Memphis officers who have been fired and charged with second-degree murder. They were part of a tough anti-crime unit with the  unfortunate name Scorpion; it has now been suspended. We saw them on video slashing and pummeling Nichols long after he was helpless and limp, suggesting some deep spasm of rage.  

The tough-guy policing posture has been widely adopted in the U.S., even as some departments are now trying to teach de-escalation techniques. American police in some cities have been militarized, with camouflage uniforms and olive-drab personnel carriers, taking them far from the benign Norman-Rockwell image of the friendly neighborhood cop.

Indeed, a white Los Angeles probation officer, Jim Galipeau, saw the police as little more than a gang. “Cops and gang members are much more alike than they are different,” he said thirty years ago. “If you could get them together, they can relate to each other. L.A.P.D. is the baddest gang in L.A.”

Are Black cops different? Yes and no. An O.G. (original gangster) in L.A. nicknamed Snoop (alias Fred Hill) told me this story while Galipeau listened and contradicted nothing:

 On several occasions, Black officers participated in a scheme to get drug dealers and gang leaders rubbed out when there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them. “They arrests the guy on a trump charge and take him to the police station. Impounds his car,” said Snoop. “He’s in the station waiting to bail out. During the time he’s in the station, two officers, all Black, put on a black beanie, some local gloves, and get their weapons and drive through his rival gang area, drop the windows out of his car, shoot somebody down, take it back to the lot, put it back. In the morning the youngster bails out of jail, gets in his car, and soon as he drives in that area and stops at a gas station, he gets killed.”

A 16-year-old drug dealer in South Central L.A. gave me this observation about Black cops back in the 1990s: “When you’re driving in a car and there’s three people or maybe four people in the car, you always up to something, in the police eyes. They’re telling us, ‘Too many black heads together. You-all are gonna do something.’ . . . Sometimes Black police try to show off for the white cops—you know, frisk you all hard, and you’re like, ‘Damn, brother, what’s going on?’ . . . When there’s two blacks, they be cool. Sometimes, not all white police is like that, though. Some white police is just as cool as the next.”

No reliable national data exist on the behavior of Black and white police officers. The Washington Post database on police killings by gunfire (about 1,100 people annually, the vast majority armed) contains the race of the victims but not of the cops.

One difficulty in making comparisons is that Blacks tend to be assigned to higher crime Black neighborhoods, where they would be expected to make more stops and more arrests. Correcting for that bias, a study found that Black officers in Chicago tended to make fewer stops, fewer arrests for minor crimes, and to use force less than whites. And the force they used was less likely to cause injury.

The researchers examined police records of 1.6 million “enforcement events” involving 7,000 officers from 2012 through 2015. Blacks used force 32 percent less frequently than whites. They stopped 17 percent fewer white citizens than white officers did, and 39 percent fewer Black citizens. “Most of the differences,” the authors wrote, “involved discretionary stops for ‘suspicious’ activity or minor violations.”

                There has been reasonable speculation that if the Memphis officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death had been white, they would not have been fired and criminally charged so quickly. And if Nichols had been white, he wouldn’t have been beaten so brutally, or at all. These are guesses, but their credibility testifies to a fact of American life: that race is often present, even invisibly. The question is what weight it has in a particular circumstance.

Precisely because the racial element in Memphis is ambiguous, the tragedy presents an opportunity for new thinking, free from the dogmatic polarization that has shaped the country’s debate.

Neither extreme in that debate can fix the problem. Adherents of neither “Defund the Police” nor “Blue Lives Matter” have practical answers. They have played to a stalemate that ensures only continued misdeeds and abuse.

The police can be reformed, but not defunded, i.e., abolished. The blue lives that matter need protection by redefining their tasks to conform with their skills, not as psychologists or social workers or traffic clerks putting themselves and motorists in danger to write up broken tail lights.

The common ground is there. It just has to be mapped.

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Many years ago, the Communications Officer on the US Navy destroyer where I was stationed went into a panic. He had misplaced a booklet, marked “SECRET” containing encryption keys. He scoured the radio shack where the document was usually kept, went through the officers’ wardroom where we ate, and ravaged his desk in the stateroom we shared. Nothing.

                He was a young ensign and was sure he was going to prison. I helped him look. We both had Top Secret clearances, so there was no risk of my seeing something I shouldn’t. We overturned our mattresses. We emptied drawers and lockers. Finally, on a whim, I fished around in the narrow slot between a desk and a bunk and—voila! There it was. My roommate was saved.

                Would that all officials were as terrified of classified documents going astray. But no, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden have demonstrated, and as countless lower functionaries have surely done out of sight, carelessness seems as ubiquitous as classification itself.

There are two main reasons for this. One is overclassification of material that needn’t be kept secret, or whose need for secrecy has expired. The other is a decentralization of authority over the reams of classified documents that flow across some government desks. Those in certain positions are so used to shuffling papers with one of the three basic classification levels—Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret—that they evidently get too casual.

“Misplacing classified documents is very common—happens all the time,” the BBC was toldby Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He added that certain information, such as a president’s travel schedule, is classified beforehand but need not remain secret afterwards. Yet those documents are often never put through the declassification process.

In addition, virtually every communication sent by an embassy to the State Department in Washington is classified, at least at the low Confidential level, even including reports of news stories that everybody can read in the local media. It’s too bad that Ben Franklin didn’t come up with some proverb for this like, “Absurdity numbs the conscience.”

Nevertheless, mishandling classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way can be charged as a felony. And knowingly removing classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities is a misdemeanor.

When Hillary Clinton was discovered as having used several private, personal email servers when she was Secretary of State, the FBI sifted through digital files and, according to FBI Director James Comey, found fifty-two email chains containing classified information: eight Top Secret, thirty-six Secret, and eight Confidential. Upon review by various government agencies, he said, some 2,000 additional emails, not classified when they were sent, were later “upclassified” to Confidential.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” Comey concluded, “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive highly classified information.” Seven email chains were classified “Top Secret-Special Access Program,” so sensitive that only minimal distribution is permitted on a need-to-know basis. “An unclassified system was no place for that conversation,” Comey declared.

Whether any of these emails were intercepted the FBI couldn’t determine. There was no such evidence—it would be hard to find—but Comey raised that possibility, because the FBI discovered that Clinton had used her personal email for work-related matters when she was outside the US “in the territories of sophisticated adversaries.”

Nevertheless, she was not charged. The facts failed to rise to the level required for a prosecution, Comey said. And there was a broader problem, he claimed: “The security culture of the State Department . . . was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that’s found elsewhere in the US government.”

Comey was roundly criticized for making this statement, and for his subsequent disclosure, shortly before the 2016 presidential election, that Clinton emails had been found on the computer of a disgraced former congressman, whose ex-wife had worked on the Clinton campaign. Only later did the FBI announce that those emails contained no classified material, but the political damage was done. The revelation probably contributed to her loss.

 Secrets have wandered into other strange places. In 1977, the last US ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, stashed Top Secret intelligence-related documents in the trunk of his car. The car was stolen, and when it was recovered, the documents were missing—a fact he failed to report. In 1979, the Justice Department cited “serious questions of criminal liability” but decided not to prosecute Martin, then 67, because of his poor health. He lived another eleven years.

Having watched him in Saigon, I have no doubt that if the tables had been turned, he would have campaigned for the imprisonment of any other US diplomat so careless with classified material. His hawkish, dogmatic fantasies led him to crush accurate military assessments and fiercely deny that the North Vietnamese were on the cusp of victory in 1975. He obstinately rejected orderly evacuation plans for Vietnamese who had worked with Americans, forcing other officials to evade him surreptitiously in getting people out to safety.

But he was given a free pass for letting Top Secret information be stolen by—who knows? So it typically goes for high officials. A series of slaps on the wrist were administered to retired General David Petraeus, who as CIA director gave eight bindersof classified material to his mistress and biographer. He had to resign from the CIA in 2012, serve only two years’ probation, and pay a $100,000 fine.

Given that context, what are the chances that a president or former president will sit behind bars for this? Since nefarious intent and gross negligence must be proved to get convictions, it seems a foregone conclusion that the special counsel just appointed will not see a case against President Biden   for the documents found in his private office, private house, and home garage. Biden said he was surprised and didn’t know what was in the material, whose discovery was reported immediately to the National Archives.

But not reported to the public before last November’s elections, which makes the matter more political than criminal. And politically, given the incapability of this country’s public discourse to be factual and discerning, the Biden mishandling appears to neutralize the Trump mishandling. That, despite the hundreds of documents that Trump kept as he stonewalled and lied about them to the National Archives and the Justice Department. Trump defied a subpoena, provoking the FBI to obtain a warrant and conduct a search of his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago.

Whether Trump will be indicted for having the material or for obstruction of justice is an open question as of this writing. It seems possible but unlikely.

Most officials who suffer punishment are lower-level whistleblowers who disclose classified misdeeds to the American public through the press. The wrongs they expose have included illegal surveillance of Americans and the murder of civilians and prisoners by US troops. When it comes to embarrassing information, security classifications take on the stature of holy writ.

The Obama administration prosecuted more such leakers than any other administration in US history—or threatened prosecution in ways that ruined the careers and livelihoods of those who saw their patriotism in the broadest sense, as a call to protect their country from its own malfeasance.

The lesson may be that the system of classification is no “system” at all, but a helter-skelter, inconsistently managed, often chaotic tangle of legitimate secrets mixed with speculation by intelligence agencies, outdated information, and self-serving censorship of inconvenient truths. It needs extensive reform, which probably won’t come unless it truly endangers those at the heights of government.

 

By David K. Shipler

See Part I Here

 

                Like a broken clock that tells the right time twice a day, former President Donald Trump’s recent call for the Constitution to be terminated was a fleeting moment of honesty. He never honored the Constitution in practice, despite his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” it. He sought to undermine its foundational separation of powers, and of course its mechanism of electoral democracy.

                Still raging and lying about the 2020 election, he wrote in early December, “A Massive Fraud [sic] of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” His post appeared on his media platform, Truth Social, whose title aptly echoes the paradoxical name the Soviet Communist Party gave to its newspaper: “Truth” (Pravdain Russian). Need we cite Orwell yet again?

                This prominent a dismissal of the Constitution was a break from a long, modern American tradition. By and large, all sides in the most acrimonious debates ritually cite the document in reverence. They interpret it variously to suit their own arguments, to be sure, sometimes with convoluted sophistry. But they rarely hope to cast it aside. Even the January 6 rioters hailed the Constitution as they violated it by storming the Capitol to disrupt the sacred process of counting Electoral College votes.

                So, what is the significance of Trump’s remark? He has been sneered at for years whenever he utters absurdities, with much of the public thinking that he has finally crossed the line into a territory of his own demise. But for millions of his spellbound supporters, that line is as imaginary as the horizon, receding as he approaches it.

                After his comment on “termination,” only a bare majority (51 percent) of registered voters polled by Quinnipiac University said it disqualified him from running again for president. A substantial 40 percent said it was not disqualifying. The figures among Republicans were troubling: Disqualified—just 17 percent. Not disqualified—72 percent. Democrats, predictably, were the opposite: 86 percent said he was disqualified, 12 percent said not disqualified.       

                Is this simply a matter of tribal politics? Of misplaced hero worship? Or does it reveal something deeper, an eroding respect for the Constitution as a bulwark of freedom and a manual of pluralistic liberty? If a new constitutional convention were held today, what kind of document would emerge?

Would white supremacists find their seats through the Republican Party? Would freedom of the press (“enemies of the people,” according to Trump) be abandoned? Would adverse speech be outlawed? Would state-sponsored religion be codified? Would voting rights be curtailed? Would the three branches’ balance of power be tilted one way or another? Would due process, the right to counsel, the right against self-incrimination, the right of security against unreasonable search and seizure, equal protection under law, and the constitutional building blocks of racial justice survive? It’s hard to be confident.

No longer is the Republican Party a dependable defender of the constitutional system. Even after some losses in the mid-terms by their election-denying candidates, most leading Republicans reacted to Trump’s “termination” demand with silence or equivocation, hardly the way to preserve a functioning democracy. They still fear crossing Trump and losing primaries.

Republican officeholders continue riding the currents of popular discomfort with the hurly burly of pluralistic politics. The grievances he manipulates will surely survive him: impatience with the cacophony of multiple voices, distaste for “other” Americans who are not white or Christian or heterosexual, resentment toward experts who appear condescending, a sense of alienation and powerlessness against the bigness of governmental and corporate and academic authority. 

Dragging the Constitution into raw politics is nothing new. Nor is the American reflex defending individual autonomy, which has been an asset as a deep aversion to autocratic government. Yet individualism has also been mobilized against the welfare of others, fueling an imperious social and religious agenda on the right. If the Constitution were read to permit all citizens to do whatever suits them, it would be deemed a threat to decent order. That would spell its death as a vibrant set of principles just as surely as if its protections are diluted by excessive judges and legislators. The Constitution stands in the central square of liberty and order, a ground that is eroding.

In every country where freedom has been threatened, the alarmists are usually a small minority, the activists only a fraction of the population. They might eventually mobilize the broader conscience of their nation, but initially they tower above the crowd, figures against the sky. They are inevitably vilified and ridiculed and demonized, as they are now by the extremists who have captured the Republican Party.

Once upon a time, the invasion of the Capitol would have ignited outrage across the full range of both major political parties. Liz Cheney would have been the darling of rock-ribbed conservative Republicans instead of the villain swamped in a primary by Wyoming voters who were unmoved by her lonely defense of constitutional democracy. This is not such a time.

The fragility of a system built on words and operated on shared values was understood by the fifty-five white men who labored, bargained, and sweated through the steaming Philadelphia summer of 1787. They carried parochial and territorial interests into Independence Hall, and they were far from flawless. Some were slaveholders. All were privileged. Their number excluded women and Blacks, and so were radically unrepresentative. Their debates were tense, and their nerves were edgy.

Yet they managed a set of principles larger than themselves, transcending their personal foibles and self-serving concerns. That remarkable achievement by imperfect human beings is often blanked out by those at each extreme of today’s political spectrum.

On the right, the Framers are seen as god-like oracles to justify the pinched “originalism” that narrows the Constitution’s empowerment of individual liberty and practically denies its application to evolving society. On the left, the Framers are denigrated for their demography, and for their unseemly compromises with Southern slave states to win ratification of the controversial document.

When either extreme is blind to the majesty of the result, when the right diminishes its scope and the left discounts its universality, the Constitution’s viability flags. Among all the damages that Trump has caused this beloved country, this latest can become the most sinister—unless decisively repudiated.

The Constitution is only alive in a stormy society that uses it wisely. As a piece of parchment, it is much like the nautical chart in the poet Philip Booth’s hard and luminous account of sailing in fog. Not only must the depths and reefs marked on paper be observed, he writes, but also the “set of tide, lost buoys, and breakers’ noise on shore where no shore was.” Booth's final line, a caution to the sailor, also speaks to those who love the United States Constitution: “The chart is not the sea.”

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Despite Donald Trump’s political wounds from the mid-terms, his strategy of hateful polarization and autocratic assaults on democracy have not been defeated. They no longer depend on his personal demagoguery but have been woven into the fabric of the Republican Party. No true cleansing seems likely without a much more thorough drubbing at the ballot box than Republicans just experienced a week ago.

There is good reason for the relief that prevailed on the American left after Republicans failed to sweep the mid-term elections “as expected.” But expectations are figments of prediction, not reality. The Democrats held the Senate, yes, and few of Trump’s endorsed candidates achieved high enough office to rig vote counts, thankfully. Subverting democracy is not so easy.

But a glass half full is also a glass half empty. Many races were infinitesimally close, with millions of Americans ignoring Republicans’ dangerous campaign to undermine faith in elections, whose integrity is the pillar of government by the people. And the Republicans are still at it: gerrymandering upheld by rightwing judges, voter suppression laws, intimidation at the polls, threats scaring honest election workers to resign, and their biased replacements infiltrating local electoral systems.

According to much of the post-election analysis, the voting seemed less about Republicans vs. Democrats than about Democrats vs. Expectations. The expectations lost, mainly because they were so excessive.

Who was expecting what? Pundits, speculators, politicians, and reporters engaged in an orgy of expectations: the expectation that history would win by overrunning the party in power, as usual in mid-terms. That inflation would win by blaming the party in power. That crime would win by indicting the party in power. The word “expect” in all its parts of speech should be banned from political coverage.

                But did the Democrats win? If getting through a stalemated war without getting killed is winning, sure. But this war is far from over, and the bad guys are still at the gates.

On the one hand, none of the Republican candidates who called the 2020 presidential election fraudulent won office to supervise the next elections in swing states, including Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. That removed part of the threat that the accuracy of future vote counts would be undermined by partisan secretaries of state and governors. On the other hand, election deniers won as secretaries of state in four states, and eight were elected as governors.

The mainstream of the Republican Party remains a conduit for the once-fringe white supremacist theories of social grievance and calls to political violence. Republicans swept Florida, the epicenter of school censorship, book banning, immigrant-bashing, and other assaults on liberty. The party retains its anti-democracy desires.

And while Democrats cheered the narrowness of Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives, it is precisely that razor thin majority that will give leverage to the radical Freedom Caucus and its most demented members, such as Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ironically, a larger majority might have given the Republican leadership space for some moderation. Depending for votes by the likes of Boebert and Greene will make the chamber into a platform for slander, character assassination, guilt by association, wild fabrications, and other do-nothing cacophony.   

Conventional interpretations of political developments reveal two chronic problems of journalism. One is short-term memory. The other is the personification of policy.

The first is imposed by tight news cycles, which tend to create fads of interest. Topics and analyses flare and disappear like shooting stars. “News” is defined as something “new.” Therefore, events comprising both the changing and the unchanging—as most significant events do—are distorted by a lens that puts newness into focus and blurs the rest. What is different is emphasized; what remains constant is not. The midterm elections were a classic example, for much in the body politic remained basically unchanged.

The second defect—personification--comes from journalism’s limits of time and space, and its need to catch and appeal to the fleeting attention of the public. Attributing policy to personality—"Biden’s agenda,” “Trump’s candidates”—isn’t all wrong, obviously, but it’s too easy when it ignores the society’s contributing faults and virtues. Maureen Dowd had it right when she wrote that Trump had opened the Pandora’s Box of American demons. For years he was pictured as the cause when he was in fact the symptom, the facilitator. Now, it’s clear that Trumpism has taken root and can grow without him.

Therefore, while Trump’s political stature has been a central topic of coverage, and he remains the object of our obsession as he runs again for president, his malice has been institutionalized.

The same can be said of Vladimir Putin, by the way. Our concentration on him as the wellspring of all Russian evil misses the broader historical patterns of yearning that have transcended Russian governments since before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Even if Putin were toppled, Russia’s thin-skinned sense of humiliation, its messianic impulses, and its lust for respect through territorial expansion would not necessarily be toppled as well. His replacement might be as bad or worse.

So might Trump’s. In the White House, he was crude and sloppy, incurious about how to pull the levers of government and cultivate alliances within law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies. There are potential Republican challengers who are smarter and equally malicious: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who just won election in a 19-point landslide.

In rallies, though, Trump is a marksman, hitting the targets of resentment. Perhaps a Trumpist successor would lack the rhetorical skill to incite mobs of hateful white Americans to channel their sense of powerless and marginalization. Perhaps. But Trump has been a model of demagoguery, so emulation can be expected.

There are those of us looking forward eagerly to a Trump political failure. But it would be no guarantee of salvation. Pandora’s Box has been opened.